U. S. Energy Consumption

Estimated U. S. Energy Consumption in 2023: 93.6 Quads

Found this on Casey Handmer's Blog. Click to embiggenate. A quad is a unit of measurement equal to one quadrillion (10^15) British Thermal Units (BTUs). I suspect that Rejected Energy (the gray box in the upper right corner of the chart) is energy that is converted to heat and dissipated, and Energy Services (the block box in the lower right corner) is energy that was used for useful things. So roughly one third of the 93.6 quadrillion BTUs were used to do something useful, and the other two-thirds was was converted to waste heat. This is a bunch, but it is negligible compared to the zillion BTUs the sun delivers every day.

Bearing Failure

The Ghost in the Gearbox: How White Etch Cracks Haunt the Wind Industry
Lubrication Explained

If you spend as much time on YouTube as I do, I am sure you have seen numerous videos of wind turbines catching fire, falling apart or otherwise failing. This guy gives us a good explanation of the root cause of these failures. The key point is that these bearings fail without any warning, no indication that there is anything wrong, and then boom! All of sudden the bearing fails and the whole thing disintegrates. The thing he doesn't talk about is just how big the loads are in wind turbine bearings and how much stress there is. I look at those things with those hundred foot long blades and I'm thinking that the loads on the bearings have got to be out of this world. So maybe we are actually going to learn something useful from this whole wind turbine / green-energy debacle.

On the road in Cheyenne Wyoming

Cheyenne, WY, C&S overpass

We've gotten off of Interstate 80 and are driving into town and I see signal trestle over the railroad tracks that run parallel to our road. There are four sets of lights mounted on the trestle, which I suspect means there are four tracks. Not too much farther on I see this overpass (above) with a train on it. A train track crossing a train track?!?! I don't think I've ever seen such a thing before. There are bridges that carry train tracks over roads, and bridges that carry roads over train tracks, but a bridge that carries train tracks over train tracks, that's gotta be a first.
    On top of that the train on the overpass was loaded exclusively with what looked like sections of wind power pylons. I would have liked to have got a picture, but I was running on about 3 hours of sleep and pulling my camera out was beyond me.

Cheyenne Wyoming Train Overpass from Google Earth

It's a little spooky how much Google Earth knows about us. Taking a nap this afternoon I felt a series of thumps, Train going by a hundred yards away.
On a side note, a couple of blocks past this bridge there is a street called Missile Drive. Cheyenne must of been a hot bed of activity during the cold war.

Wind Turbine Time Lapse Assembly

MidAmerican Energy Company - From the Ground Up: Building our energy future, one turbine at a time
I don't know that I like these giant wind turbines. It's all very nice that we're getting electricity for 'free', but that is a big, expensive piece of equipment. You would need to generate a great deal of electricity to pay for such a big machine. I supposed they work out eventually, I mean once you set them up they don't require a great deal of attention, so in ten or twenty or a hundred years they should pay for themselves, assuming of course they generate enough electricity to pay for the interest on the loan. Interest rates are low these days, so maybe now is a good time to build them.
    A second problem is you are still getting your electricity from a giant soulless corporation and you are going to be subject to all the problems you get with that arrangement, like blackouts and brownouts and getting your power shut off because you failed to pay your bill. On the other hand, all you have to do is pay your bill. No fussing with generators and wind storms and construction contractors.
    The last problem is birds. There was some noise about birds getting killed by older, smaller wind turbines. Then we got these big ones and people said that it wouldn't be as big a problem because look how slow they are turning. Yes, the RPM's are low, but the speed of the tips of the blades is still very high, maybe even higher than the old ones, so I could see how there could still be a problem. But maybe all the stupid birds have been killed off so now we only have birds who are smart enough to avoid these things.

Via Posthip Scott.

Toothpicks

I was looking at the chili factory in Fort Madison because I thought it belonged to Hormel, but it turns out that it belongs to Pinnacle Foods. But I'm looking at the map and on the other side of the main railroad line I see all these toothpick like things lying on the ground and I wonder what the devil could they be. Telephone poles, maybe? No! They are wind turbine blades. This here is the Siemens factory.

St. Albert the Gaseous

Wish I could breath fire like that.

Bloomberg, via Tyler Durden and Dustbury, tells me that Al Gore is now a rich man with something like 200 million dollars at his beck and call, which puts him on the same playing field as Mitt Romney, his arch-enemy in the political game. However, Al is not a businessman of the same stripe as Romney. While Romney made his fortune through conventional rapacious Republican techniques of screwing the little guy and sucker punching the market, Al made his money through his political connections.
    Current TV, that he sold to Al-Jazeera, wasn't worth the $70 million they paid for it. Someone liked Al well enough to give him the money. Buying Current TV was just the cover story. Whether it was someone in Qatar (which is where Al-Jazeera is from) or someone who knew someone in Qatar who made that decision, we will probably never know. The only thing you can be sure is that someone has added Al to their ranks, just whose ranks those are is a little hard to tell. I mean, what has all this brou-ha-ha over global warming accomplished? Oh, that's right, tax breaks for wind power companies. I suppose that could be worth $70 million.
   The Apple stock deal was similar. Someone decided Al needed some money, so they gave him a job on Apple's board of directors, for which he didn't get paid, but he got some stock options, which he eventually cashed in. It's kind of like winning the lottery, except you don't even have to buy a ticket, you just have to know the right people.
    Apple stock is kind of like Tesla stock. Some people are just ga-ga over it. I wouldn't be surprised if both were a complete sham. Say you start a company and you issue a million shares of stock which you sell for a dollar each to your friends (pretend you have a lot of friends). Now you have a million dollars to use to start your company. Now your friends start talking about what a great company you have and how it's going to make a bunch of money and more people want to get in on the action, so they try and buy shares in the company, but nobody is selling any shares, except for your cousin Arnold who you never got along with very well anyway, but he's only got one share, and there are like a zillion people who want to get in on this deal so they start bidding the price up and eventually somebody buys Arnold's share for a $100. Now your company, which last week was worth one million dollars is now "worth" $100 million because this one share was sold. Right. Dump a a big chunk of shares on the market right now and watch the price plummet.
     Now all you have to do is wait out the SEC specified waiting period, and if people are still ga-ga over your stock, you can dump your options on the market for a nice fat windfall, without having to use any of your own money.

Title stole from Dustbury.

Eastbound

I was thinking that an audio book would help pass the time on the road to Denver. I used to get audio books from the library and listen to them on my way to work. I did that until I had pretty much exhausted the Beaverton library's selection. But it's been a while, and besides I live in Hillsboro now, so they are liable to have some I haven't heard. When I find the audio books section in the new library I realize it's been more than a while, it's been an age. All their audio books are on CD's. They do not have a single one on cassette tape. Well, that's it for that plan.

Once I get out of Portland I set the cruise control for 75 MPH, which is ten over the limit, which is my standard cruising speed. I have gotten a few speeding tickets in my life, but they have all been for flagrant speeding. The last time I was going 75 in a 55 zone. I have never gotten stopped for going ten over the limit on the highway. I read somewhere once upon a time that cops won't bother you for ten over, it's within the realm of mechanical error, or it's arguable or something. City streets are another matter.

Blue Mountains in sight, Thursday May 24, 5 PM

All the way across Oregon and Idaho it's smooth sailing. Traffic is light. There isn't even any congestion going up the switchbacks into the Blue Mountains just past Pendleton, where things usually manage to get clogged up. I stop for the night in Twin Falls at a Days Inn.

Friday takes me South into Utah past Ogden and then East on Interstate 80 to Wyoming. That was two exits that I made just by the skin of my teeth (the other one was where I-84 turns into I-86 and if you want to stay on I-84, you need to take the exit). There may been warning signs miles ahead of time, but I missed them all. It wasn't until the exit was in my sights that I realized, oh! I better get over there. Fortunately I was aware enough that I was able to make it look smooth and well planned. It wasn't one of  those veer-across-six-lanes-of-traffic-and-clip-the-sign-post-on-your-way kind of deals.

Traffic was kind of heavy around Ogden, as you might expect. It lightened up a little as I approached Wyoming, but it never got as light as it was across Oregon and Utah. There weren't a lot of cars, and hardly any RV's, but there sure were a heck of a lot of trucks. I swear there were as many trucks as there were cars. And some of those truck drivers are a just a little inconsiderate. Back in the day I used to do a lot of cross country driving, and truckers seemed a little more on top of it. When one truck passed another, as soon as he was far enough ahead to pull in front of the passed truck, the passed truck would flash his lights to let him know there was room to pull back in. And it wasn't a lot of room, maybe 20 feet. Now they stay in the left lane, completely oblivious to the fact that they are holding up a whole line of cars. Okay, maybe just me. Still, it's rude. But that's nothing in comparison to these yahoos who take ten miles to pass another truck. They pull out and start to gain on the guy in front, but it's at the rate of a couple of feet per minute. Look dude, take my number and give me a call when you complete this maneuver. I'm just going to pull over and take a nap while you screw around for the next 20 minutes. Jughead.

And then there were the speed demons. About half of the cars were traveling upwards of 85 MPH. As the speed limit was 75, 85 should have been my normal speed. I must be getting old, or calm, because 75 suited me just fine. So now not only do I have to contend with ordinary trucks and rude trucks but I also need to watch out for speed demons. Don't want to pull out in front of one of those guys. One, it would be rude, and two, at these speeds it could be dangerous. I often found myself coming up on a truck, getting ready to pass, and then I look in the mirror and see a black dot rapidly getting larger, so I let off the gas and slow down till speedy flies by, and then we can go. So no more set-it-and-forget-it cruising.

Friday May 25, 3 PM	Friday May 25, 5 PM

Wyoming was kind of depressing. The route the Interstate takes is the same route used by the Oregon trail pioneers, the Pony Express, the first transcontinental railroad, and the first cross-country highway. It's all at high elevation, over a mile high. The land is covered with sagebrush. There were the occasional oil and windmill installations, small towns and trains. I don't think I even saw any cows. I saw a couple of what looked like new housing developments. One was a small block of nearly cubical houses, what some people might call crackerboxes, another was just mobile homes. I suppose it's for the oil boom. I hope those people are making some money. It's certainly a grim looking location, but good pay could make it tolerable.

Two trains meet. 4 PM

Trains. Lots of trains, and not coal trains either. I probably passed a train going one way or the other every hour or so. Wyoming is so wide open there were places where you could see an entire mile long train at once.

I spent the second night at a Quality Inn in Laramie. It was a little spendy, but it was late and I was tired, and I didn't want to spend a bunch of time screwing around looking for a place that might only be 20 bucks cheaper. A little better planning might have saved me some money on lodging, but that planning ahead business, that's too much like work.

Friday, May 26, 10 AM

Once I got into Colorado traffic was thick and unpleasant. Downtown Denver appeared in a brown haze. Ross lived on Capital Hill, where there is no parking, much like any congested urban area: all the free on-street parking is taken, everything else is pay through the nose. Fortunately is was Saturday so I was able to find a place that was only a couple of blocks away.

Windmills on the Way

I saw a bunch of windmills on my trip. I only took a couple of pictures because after you've seen a couple of thousand they all begin to look alike. I took these on the way to Denver. They are kind of grainy because they were taken at long distances without the benefit of zoom. What you see has been cropped from a much larger image. This first one is a bunch of windmills in the Columbia Gorge on the Washington side of the river.

This is a bigger bunch, much farther away in Wyoming. Yes, each of those little white sticks is a hundred foot tall windmill pylon. They were much more visible to my eyes. A camera is a poor substitute.

Installation is an ongoing process. Here is one blade being hauled down the road. 

Economic notes from the Hinterland

Iowa Man writes:

Talking to a Bob, a older guy that mows lawns in his spare time. A big time Cubs fan in a town where your either a Cubby or Cardinals fan.

Bob works at Pinnacle Foods, which everyone calls Armour, recalling its' earlier owner.

He receives 2,000 pound, pallets of frozen deboned beef and pork. Placed into a large pot heated with spices and other ingredients, voila Chili, Beef stew or something else.

Bob says he has never seen it so busy. They are running 12 hour shifts 7 days a week. The weak economy is good for them, people are buying up cheap food.

Pinnacle is owned by the Blackstone Group which is traded as BX on the NYSE.

The stock is languishing but paying 16%

Some links:

• Wikipedia article on Pinnacle Foods
• Pinnacle Foods Corporate website
• Hoover's fact sheet on Pinnacle Foods
• Wikipedia article on The_Blackstone_Group
• Hoover's fact sheet on The Blackstone Group

Also Siemens started shipping its wind turbine blades (130') by rail from Fort Madison: Pretty amazing site, will try to get some pics.

The photo that accompanied the story about the wind turbine blades is pretty pitiful, so I went and collected some more off the net.

Theoretically speaking, wind turbines seem like a pretty good idea. Free power, or at least power without any fuel. But each of these turbines cost around $2.5 million installed. How long is it going to take to pay that back? Evidently some people think the payback time is reasonable.

And then there's the feeling I get when I see these things. Mostly they are installed in open fields, and it just strikes me that there is something wrong with sticking these enormous spindly structures in the middle of the fields. Maybe it's just my attraction to "wide open spaces", and there is no real good basis for my feelings.

And then there are the birds. I came across one story that claimed most bird strikes happened with older, smaller and faster spinning turbines, and since the newer turbines spin slower, it shouldn't be a problem. Well, the rotational speed of these turbines is much lower, taking maybe six seconds to complete a revolution, but the diameter is much larger and so the linear velocity at the outer ends of the blades is much higher. For a turbine with 130 foot long blades, turning at ten RPM (six seconds per revolution), the linear velocity at the tip of the blade is over 90 MPH.